Sunday, October 11, 2015

I have amassed a huge collection and painted a fair whack of them. This week I have been hand wrapping and packing every single treasure I have, ready to go into storage for an indefinite period. his is bittersweet, but let's talk about the sweet.

The Sweet

In five years I have achieved a lot and a lot has happened.

I have managed to assemble a collection that makes people cry. It is making me cry right now, as I have to lift the bloody thing. I have enough unpainted citadel minis in one box to act as a weight for a trebuchet.

I have gone from dull, quite rudimentary painting to a punchy, vibrant, smooth style that I was always aiming for. Fraser Gray, thanks for being a fantastic inspiration.

I have amassed literally* all the paint.*figuratively speaking.

I have learned to convert and scratch build miniatures- to the point where I started a business selling them, and have made minis professionally for other companies.

I have made many friends, all who have helped me immensely through my dark days. Just one example of many examples, Frank Mentzer messaged me because I was having a particularly dark day on FaceBook one day. That day happened to be the 30th anniversary of Red Box. Teenage me would have exploded if I told her that. <3.

I now own this very model from Ratspike...

I know right? Mine. Allll mine. Thanks Steve.

I have three quarters of The Undead Assault project done. As a child I could never have imagined this would be possible!

I had a beautiful baby boy! We named him Tobias after both Labyrinth and the Tim & Tobias books.

And of course, The Mumak in the room, I was finally diagnosed as intersex and transgender, and decided to go public with my transition, despite the openly transphobic nature of the miniature community at the time. This took a lot of guts to do, but ultimately was for the best. Again, your support was astounding and heartwarming. This of course caused major disruptions in my life and resulted in Skulldred and Darkling miniatures being put on hold.

What now?

Going forward, I am very much looking forward to setting up a new studio, getting these boxes shipped and unwrapping them. It is going to be the most epic Christmas ever.

I am going to enjoy finishing some of the projects I have been looking forward to, but have not had the strength.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Thankfully, a job came through for me, which is a literal life saver. The double edged sword of this is that it is based in Melbourne and I have to relocate. But that is quite exciting. Melbourne is particularly good to it's geeks, with geek culture shops like Minotaur, a fun gaming scene, some lovely tabletop gaming shops and of course it hosts PAX, the Penny Arcade game conference. Speaking of which I will be attending PAX as a booth bitch for The Academy of Interactive Entertainment, doing live digital creature sculpts.

Today marks the end of an era, with my studio being packed down into shipping containers. It's easy to wax lyrical. This room has seen my first faltering steps in my return to mini gaming, going from a handful of miniatures I still had kept from my childhood to one of the most enviable collections in the southern hemisphere, made up of thousands and thousands of the glorious little lead bastards. This room has seen me go from tinkering with green stuff, to becoming a professional miniature sculptor. I made The Bederken Dwerg here. I designed, sculpted, packed and posted every mini by hand from here.

It wasn't usually this messy. Well... uh... not always.

There is so much to do, and I have to individually wrap and pack each figure well enough to survive storage for a year or so and a nine hour truck ride handled by half-orc minions. I have decided to wrap them each in toilet paper and densely stack them in plastic tubs. Toilet paper is acidic, so only those with paint on them will be stored this way. Still, it's a huge job.

All my current faves, Bottom left you can see my limited edition shelf with some torture chamber victims.

The picture above shows just one of the shelves to pack down. So many memories. It will be a while before I get to play with them again. It's kinda nice putting them all to bed, safe and sound. After being homeless and away from them, I was so happy to see them all again. Little treasures one and all.

The tubs bottom right contain unpainted minis, the ones on the left contain painted ones. I haz a lot.

A move is, of course, also a wonderful chance to de-clutter. I have thrown out tonnes and tuns of foam, unfinished scenery and enough scratch building junk destined to make my Necromunda martian table. That is a loss, but hey, I did dump all those shitty redundant codexes and books. Someones gonna have a field day down on the street with this stuff.

As I will be living in share houses whilst I rebuilt my life, I doubt I will be able to do much painting. I plan to take a small sculpting kit with me, the one I bring to Cancon, but it is doubtful I will be back to King's miniatures for a while.